Living Under a Rock

Day 4 Cont...

So it has begun. As we speak the Xbox motherboard is sitting naked on my computer desk, with the soldering iron heating up next to it. My friends went to pick up a pizza. They made me stay home so I could "calm down". Anyways I think I am just going to go for it and solder the damn pins. I would rather fail all alone then have other people watch me do it. I am taking lots of pictures that I will post up here, later. Anyways so uhhhh the next post will either be a "YEY" or a "WHAT THE F#$K!".

Day 4

My EXECUTER 3 CAME IN! Woo hoo! I also ordered my hard drives from NewEgg.com . I think I am just going to use the 120GB boot drive that is in my computer for the Xbox. So that means I will soon have to go through the horrors of formatting HDD again :( . Anyways today I also sent back the ColdHeat and bought a cheap soldering iron, lead free solder, and a small set of soldering tools from RadioShack (all for the price of 1 ColdHeat). So now I am all ready to solder and it seems all my confidence has gone down the drain. Truth be told I soldered once. It was in my school Tech class, on the contrary I did an awesome job soldering those 3 wires together but then again, it was only 3 wires... So I am inexperienced and I am about to work with a machine that I originally cost 300 dollars. Oh boy.

My two friends are coming over to "help me". In reality they both would love to see me fail and ruin my Xbox. Now that would be a story to tell.

Day 3

Still waiting on the Xecuter 3. I got my ColdHeat in today, and instantly ordered an RMA for it. I'll ship it back tommorow. Also tommorow is the day I should get some moneys in my PayPal account, so I can order the drives for my computer then... I think I am going to order 2 of these. I like the storage to price ratio and I like Western Digital drives. I'll put my IDE 300GB Maxtor into the Xbox.

Day 2

Well today not much has been done on the modding front. All I am doing right now is waiting for the modchip to come in. Also I found out that apparently you can not use ColdHeat on circuit boards, which blows. So now as soon as I get it, I will have to send out an RMA. Which sucks cause that means I have to lose money on shipping. But whatever, at least I didn't fry my motherboard with a ColdHeat. Better to lose 10 bucks on shipping than lose 150 on a new Xbox. So now I am just going to go to Radio Shack and buy a cheap soldering iron and some solder. I think I am going to hold out on the hard drive because I am going to make sure I get it moded first without screwing anything up, then I will put in the new hard drive. Anyways I think I am just going to use the 2nd HDD that is in my computer, it's 300GB which should be more than enough. I'll just order 2 new SATA drives for my computer, I always wanted to run a RAID config anyways...

Another thing I did today was test out how well my wireless network is capable of playing video. My conclusion is that a 801.11G network is more than capable of handling great quality video. The hitches with this task will be in the software that will be used on the Xbox, the paltry 64MB of RAM that the Xbox has and the 733MHZ P3 chip that the Xbox runs. Stay tuned more to come.

Day One

I have never done a modification before so this whole experience should be interesting. The first question I asked myself was, why mod a perfectly good Xbox? Well the answer to that is simple, I want to make it better. Here are my goals for this project:

Install Xecuter 3 Modchip (soldering is required).
Install new hard drive into Xbox.
Integrate Xbox into my WIFI 801.11G network.
Install Xbox Media Center software (XBMC).
Be able to access videos/music from my computer(which is downstairs) through the Xbox (which is upstairs).
Gain the ability to play online through Kai network (no need to pay for Xbox Live)
Get a cool box that will be better than everyone else's :)

I pretty much have a clear idea of what I have to do, since I have been researching this subject for a week. I can see the only hitches occurring with the soldering and WIFI.

The first thing I have to do is get a mod chip. After researching the subject I came out with the Xecuter 3 as the best choice because:

A. Huge Community that is willing to support me in the chance problems arise
B. It has a huge array of features.
C. I wanted to buy through PayPal so my choices of stores are limited.

I ordered my mod chip through Extreme-Mods.com. I liked the stores customer satisfaction rate. The other item I ordered was the ColdHeat soldering iron from ThinkGeek.com . I have seen a review of it online and liked the fact that I would not burn myself and that it had a flashlight built in.

The hard drive I am going to use for this modification is my Western Digital 250 gigabyte drive that is inside my computer right now.

I am also contemplating getting a WRT54G wireless router (I already have one) and use the second one as a wireless bridge. The only thing I would have to do is use the hacked firmware for it that is readily available online.

So right now the only thing I can do is wait for my ColdHeat and Xecuter to come in. Then the modding shall begin..

Focus of this Blog

A lot of time has passed since I first made this blog. It took me a while to discover what I was going to do with it... Well now I know. For the following month the focus of this blog will be on me modding my XBOX.